stela barbieri · genius loci – o espÍrito do lugar maria antônia, são paulo - sp. critical...

STELA BARBIERI

Stela Barbieri Stela Barbieri is an artist, curator and consultant in

education, arts and literature. She is a counsellor of the

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation since 2012. She was the

educational curator of the São Paulo Art Biennial (2009-14)

and the Educational Action director at the Tomie Ohtake

Institute (2002- 2014). Stella is an arts advisor at the Vera

Cruz School, where she began to work as an educator

in 1988. She is also an author of children’s books and a

storyteller. Currently, she directs the Binah Arts Space, a live

studio, with experimental labs, lectures and courses.

RECENT EXHIBITIONS

2013 - 2016

MÁQUINAS DE PAISAGENS - CRIA

MINAS TÊNIS CLUB - 2019

stela barbieri, 2018

MÁQUiNas De FaZer PaisaGeNs

MiNas tÊNis - bH

MIRANTES

SESC JUNDIAÍ- 2018


MiraNtes

sesC JUNDiaÍ - sP

ALINHAVOS

EMIA- 2018


aliNHaVOs

eMia - sP

PAISAGENS GRÁFICAS

CULTURAL CENTER PORTO SEGURO- 2016

stela barbieri aND FerNaNDO Vilela, 2016. PaisaGeNs GrÁFiCas

CUltUral CeNter POrtO seGUrO, sãO PaUlO-sP

SÓNONÓS

BRAZILIAN BRITISH CENTER - 2016

stela barbieri, 2016. sóNONós

braZiliaN britisH CeNter, sãO PaUlO-sP

PLACES PROJECT

2014 - 2015


PlaCe tO Create sPaCes

sesC sãO CarlOs-sP


PlaCe tO bUilD

sesC baUrU-sP


PlaCe tO reaD

sesC sãO CarlOs-sP


PlaCe tO PlaNt

sesC OsasCO-sP


PlaCe OF liQUiD COMbiNatiONs

sesC sãO CarlOs-sP


PlaCe tO DraW

sesC beleNZiNHO-sP


PlaCe tO sOW

sesC bOM retirO-sP


tO see tHe laNDsCaPe

OFiCiNa CUltUral OsWalD De aNDraDe-sP


eNJOY

OFiCiNa CUltUral OsWalD De aNDraDe-sP

VORTEX

CENTRAL GALERIA DE ARTE - 2014

stela barbieri, 2014. VOrtex

CeNtral Galeria De arte, sãO PaUlO-sP


CirCUit OF liQUiD NarratiVes

CeNtral Galeria De arte, sãO PaUlO-sP

INSTALLATIONS


PaisaGeM Passa aGeM

exCHaNGe

arka kUlltUrWekstatt e. V.

esseN e HaGeM - aleMaNHa


UNtitleD

Galeria ValU Oria

sãO PaUlO - sP

stela barbieri, 1999. UNtitleD

Galeria ValU Oria, sãO PaUlO - sP


CeNtrO CUltUral sãO PaUlO-sP


MaM, sãO PaUlO - sP


CeNtrO CUltUral sãO PaUlO-sP


CeNtrO CUltUral sãO PaUlO - sP


aGUaDas

stela barbieri, 2014.

PlaCe OF liQUiD COMbiNatiONs

sesC baUrU-sP

stela barbieri, 2003. Feast

MUseU De arte De ribeirãO PretO - sP


UNtitleD

esPaçO CUltUral bM&F,

sãO PaUlO - sP

DRAWINGS AND ARTIST BOOKS

2009 - 2014

stela barbieri, 2010. artist bOOk


artist bOOk

stela barbieri, 1999. MONOtiPias

Galeria ValU Oria, sãO PaUlO-sP


GeNiUs lOCi – O esPÍritO DO lUGar

Maria aNtôNia, sãO PaUlO - sP

CRITICAL TEXTS

2014 - 2015

ACTION AREA

Agnaldo Farias

The Places Project, with authorship by Stela Barbieri, has currently five

of its works: PLACE TO READ, PLACE TO DRAW, PLACE OF LIQUID

COMBINATIONS, PLACE TO CREATE SPACES and PLACE TO SOW. It

could comprise others, all of them related to the wide spectrum of

actions, concepts, materials and territories - disciplinary and poetic -

developed by the artist. The recurrence of the term place, a common

denominator for all the works belonging to this project, some already

made, others to be invented, explains the focus of her research: the

production of spaces equipped with specific qualities.

The concept of space, despite its widespread use, brings along a highly

abstract inheritance. With its roots founded in analytic geometry, the

space concerns the idea of coordinates, position, without qualities,

homogeneous, white and accurate as much of modern architecture.

Stela dramatically rejects this concept and the images that relate to it.

In a world in which technological breakthrough generates, conversely,

the loss of experience, the direct and conscious contact with

phenomena, things and processes, it is essential, vital, to take action. It

is necessary to make people allow themselves to be taught by things,

to know through them, to know about oneself through them. It is an

urge to let their senses be fed from a parcel of the universe offered by

the sensitive world so that the being can be irrigated, so that sensitivity,

imagination and expression may arise.

Stela’s measures are, at this time, workshops-works, one of the highest

points of her career, and involving the construction of places that are

powerful, warm, challenging sites, whose artist’s brightness - who

orchestrates the situation, who proposes the field to be upturned, who

offers ways of working it as a game with rules, materials and devices so

that anyone can play it - is combined with those of the visitors, or - as

Lygia Clark would say - with those with whom Stela echoes in this

series of works: the agents.

Each of the proposed PLACES is a space of action and dream, of

engineering and poetry, of body and emotional contact, of decision

and intuition.

PLACE TO READ

Reading is an action similar to travelling, with the difference that it is

motionless. The reader, any reader, is like still traveler. Wasn’t it so that

Cioran coined Jorge Luis Borges - the great Argentine writer, director

of the huge National Library of Buenos Aires which is the subject of

several of its labyrinthine tales - the one who even after getting blind

never stopped writing?

We associate reading with books and it is normal to do so. After all,

since the invention of printing the world was populated by this object,

this portable means of transportation that takes us while we take

it home, to the sofa, to bed, to school, to everywhere we travel to,

because there is nothing like the silent company of a book. The kind of

company strictly on hand.

Books carry within them, ingrained, texts of all kinds, theories,

narratives, geographies and intimate stories that can be distant,

plausible, extraordinary. What is it that can fit into that small dense

thick object, composed of dried stacked leaves and glued on one of its

edges? Virtually all or almost all (let us leave a wide and infinite room

for all the books yet to be written).

If it is true that almost everything can fit into a book, presented in the

form of illustrations, sketches, drawings and… letters, the most abstract

of signs; if the set of figures dyeing the quadrangular pages feed our

imagination, this should be a lesson for other forms of reading. And

isn’t it a fact that one talks about the “book of the world”?

More important than the book, this lazy machine, it is the reader, the

one who sets it in motion. Learning to read is not something that

comes down to a language, but what stretches to everything. All that

there is, made or not by men’s hand, is waiting to be deciphered,

because that’s what we desire, because we cannot resist this impulse.

From the written word to the wind direction, from the most prosaic of

objects to a photo sent by Hubble, everything tells a story, everything

gives off an aroma. In fact, even a scent sets out its source which, in

some cases, is rooted in our affections.

With tables and benches, with the books collection authored by the

artist herself, with a wide range of materials, PLACE TO READ is an

area of reading expansion which doesn’t only invite to read, but to

produce narratives, even enigmatic ones, those whose content we

cannot reach to understand. For, considering the successive daily

misunderstandings, the reading of our actions does not always

coincide with what we had wanted. We are constantly read beneath

amazing optics. So why not to produce a book whose understanding

runs away from us, but which can make sense to others?

PLACE TO DRAW

To draw is to see the world up close, scrutinising its details, contours

and structure, as well as designing a world from within, expressing it

through a sketch, a figure on a piece of paper or a cave wall, or even

performing a construction.

Although admitted as a source of various human expressions, since

all of us, artists and non-artists, are used to projecting or taking notes

of ideas in the form of scribbles, doodles, sketches, the drawing that

is commonly exposed on the walls of museums and galleries is that

considered an end in itself, and not part of a long and intricate process.

Drawing, however, has to do with looking, commenting, registering,

launching an idea, both in a more advanced stage and in larval

condition. It is equivalent to putting yourself with regard to something,

whether it is before us now or it comes as memory, or even the attempt

to translate a report, such as the famous drawing of a rhino conceived

by Dürer from a description. Drawing is also a way to launch yourself

to the future, opening up to imagination and impossibility. In any case,

drawing has to do with expanding the subjectivity.

PLACE TO DRAW supports and deepens this perspective, this way of

understanding the drawing, noting that in addition to the role played

by this practice in the various processes of cognition and expression

that we use, internal or external to art, to draw concerns the way we

organize ourselves in the world, collecting from it the raw material with

which we build spaces, establish rhythms and structures.

From the beginning of her career, Stela Barbieri, who has ever been

interested in materials, combined drawings made with pencils and

brushes on paper and fabric with a varied cast of materials, both organic

and inorganic, eventually articulated. From the classic situation of the

pencil pressed by the fingers and pointed to the paper or cloth surface,

the artist threw herself into wools soaked with paint thrown against

the wall, the membranes produced by cellophane sheets stiffened

with glue, structured with metal wires, supported and arranged in the

exhibition environment.

PLACE TO DRAW provides the practice of drawing in its various versions,

ranging from the intimate scale of what is produced with the fingers to

that obtained through the body.

PLACE OF LIQUID COMBINATIONS

Analyse a kind of material, handle it, gradually understand its

peculiarities, its behaviour, its temperament, its appearance, the way it

relates to other materials, gets old; its wills, some of these hidden and

only available to be seen after lengthy studies, what is equivalent to

internalise it, become it the same way as, in the words of Camões, the

amateur becomes the loved thing.

PLACE OF LIQUID COMBINATIONS is an invitation to the involvement

held on the water, the primary liquid, an opportunity to learn some

of the lessons it offers. It is also a curious building located between

a chemical laboratory, a center of hydrological research and a water

garden with coloured blooms, planted by the visitors. It has the form of

hard containers such as glass and porcelain bottles, soft as porous tissue

or plastic bags, nearly all transparent or white, strategy to highlight

some of its most distinctive properties.

One lives thanks to the water. There is not a single day that we go

without it, what does not mean that we notice its scope, its material

and symbolic depth, bigger, much bigger than the immense importance

we attribute to it. Thus are we today: we know about things, but we

refuse to experience them; we know abstractly, and when it rains, we

rush to open umbrellas.

It is really surprising the extent of the presence of water, its ubiquity,

to know it composes most of our body, flows and spreads through

capillary webs at the same time it scatters in the air, moistening it or,

when there is a large volume, depending on environmental conditions,

getting condensed, pouring on the floor or gushing from within,

running like an outburst, in love as it is with gravity, until it settles

in lakes, ponds, thin blades whose sensitivity is denounced by how it

reacts to the breeze that rubs its surface.

PLACE OF LIQUID COMBINATIONS portrays the sweet submission of

water assuming the body of the bottle that contains it; it also portrays

the voracious and uncontrollable desire for all that is, from the rain to

the mucosa of the marshes, soaking tissues and refreshing the clay,

keeping it supple. It also shows the solubility of water, the powerful

solvent it is. And maybe just because it is odourless, tasteless and

colourless, it frays the earth pigment clod, takes the pasty ink bit stuck

in the brush upon itself, eager of the color it loads.

PLACE TO CREATE SPACES

Lines, dots, plans in sizes, shapes, textures and varied colours ... What

is it necessary to produce spaces in the space of a sheet of paper’s flat

surface? Lines and points are beacons for the eyes, elements that attract

and guide them along the inner corridors, doorways, subtle events,

garbled or not, noisy situations, tense, clenched, as in the case when the

edge of a thread bristles, when the dramatic rhythm of hatched plans

behave like capture nets, allowing the eyes to momentarily flounder as

live fish. And when it comes to colours, the drawing lights in varying

atmospheres; plans, lines and dots radiate, get exalted, escape from

themselves contaminating the nearby presence with their breath and

their sonorities, which can be discrete or aggressively acid.

Stela Barbieri draws with pencils, brushes, papers, but also with scissors,

box cutters, sticks, wire, glue, fabric and what else she empathises

with in the construction of spaces. And if paper has been her starting

point, one cannot know what her point of arrival will be, as the spatial

volume of any room is more than enough for her to invent a myriad

of environments, so that she can put in motion her ability to compose

spaces.

So it is with PLACE TO CREATE SPACES, a polymorphic, kaleidoscopic

work, founded by warm colours - red, in this case - with wooden

stakes that can be fitted together and over a kind of floor that has

been precisely prepared for this purpose, with fabrics assuming the role

of walls and ceilings, covering heights, sliding in variable speed falls,

settling, smooth or wrinkled, in solutions with the same tenderness of the

huts made of sheets and pillows that we used to build in the living rooms

of our homes on rainy days, or even better, the more enduring stalls we

used to raise in the backyard under the trees, the tiny houses where life,

watered by the imagination, was so intense and glad we could barely

stand it.

Place to create spaces is a work and a dream offered by the artist so that

everyone, both children and adults, can exercise the production of spaces.

They arrive and organise their affectionate clearings of warmth, building

houses indoors: a shifting city, taking the materials upon themselves,

undertaking with hands and bodies, deciding together the feature of the

place they want for themselves, the warm space, immersed in reddish

twilight, in which, among the children’ crystal laugh, they will talk and

play for a moment, forgetful of the outside world.

PLACE TO SOW

In 1990, Stela Barbieri exhibited in a group show held in the Paço das Artes

in São Paulo, an artwork composed by beans scattered over a rectangular

area made of layers of cotton and that occupied part of the exhibition

room. During the opening, some of her fellow artists commented quietly

that it could not properly be considered a work of art, since the author

could not control the outcome. The artist, indifferent or just oblivious to

the reservations, visited the exhibition daily in order to water the target

field, ensuring that the beans would flourish. As might be expected, soon

the delicate stems were breaking the thick web of clear and soft ground,

rising vivid, with bulbs on the ends like prying eyes.

With each passing day, the pace of alternating washes and dryness were

settling the layers of cotton, increasingly blurred by the growth of beans,

especially the roots that would be sticking and spreading underground

so as to ensure the firmness of the little plant. The progressive decay

of the cultivated field practically coincided with the peak of the beans.

The staggered design of the stems and roots, the light-brown and

green-tones sharp graphics over white fibres increasingly tarnished by a

ferruginous staining, ensured that the work, from the first to the last day

of the exhibition, would be continuously metamorphosing.

Up to what I know, this was the first time the artist exhibited a piece

orchestrated by herself, but organised in association with nature, a

co-author whose principles we do not often manage to understand.

PLACE TO SOW is the culmination of this process based on the

comprehension of the artist as someone who catalyses, or opens path for

the view of natural processes, such as the tiny, imperceptible ones, to our

naturally inattentive eyes, explosions occurring in the context of nature, in

the form of seeds that explode, disentrenching the meats and the colours

with what they will conquer the space.

The oval glass inside of which rests a minimum seed treasure, restlessly

colourful, the cylindrical tube filled up with water and a delicate green

plant, threadlike, arranged in a helical design, are examples of means

through which the mysteries and wonders of the plant world can be at

least partially revealed.

TO SEE WITH THE HANDS

Julia Buenaventura

There is nothing more annoying than going out with a long umbrella

on a sunny day. The citizen walks with the instrument like someone

who takes a strange package, being hampered by the smallest barriers,

by doors and turnstiles, and what’s more, he has to overcome adversity

with an only hand, as the other one takes the burden. Once at home, it

can only complain: Oh villain! If I had not taken you along, there would

have been a deluge!

However, I invite you not to act so severely with those umbrellas, as

they offer a particular and valuable service, that is, they teach us to see

with our hands. In fact, they offer news of objects at a distance with a

much higher accuracy than the eyes, as they often mistake: sometimes

they take soft for hard or rough. Whereas touch is infallible. It never

deceives itself. Every crevice, every change on the pavement, every

unevenness on the ground is revealed in detail. Children know well. It

is no coincidence they enjoy dragging branches on the walls: they offer

key information about the texture and hardness. What’s more, in case

a grid eventually appears, they become aware - with the compass - of

the time implied in the route.

One of the keys to enter the work of Stela Barbieri is to understand the

experience as a sensory problem, that is, the channels and the way we

feel the world. Thus, the work of this artist is an invitation for visitors

to explore their own perception mechanisms and their interactions.

An exercise that is only possible because Stela refuses to propose the

eye as king of the senses, she breaks this typically Western hierarchy,

revealing the relationships between vision and other sensory devices,

specifically the touch. Hence her work with liquids, fluids, with crushed

minerals, with flexible materials that account both pressure and weight

and - as I will explain later - with certain colours.

For her interventions at SESC, Stela Barbieri proposes the Places

Project. It consists of pieces that, far from constituting objects to be

contemplated, are open as spaces to be experienced, lived and still

transformed by the visitors, who will be able to play with the materials,

to play with the elements. That is, they will be able to know, what is

only possible through experience. The other class of knowledge, the

kind that is so much explored in universities and schools, that consists

of repeating something that another one has said, is forgotten during

that time. So here we have work-experiences that just happen in the

visitor’s time, when he loses his guest composure and becomes a

member of the family, when he begins to change the house. This is, in

short, the invitation of Barbieri.

Place to build consists of two main elements: wood and various foam

objects. The first element is structural. Thus, like a backbone, it is in

charge of chaining the space, articulating the set. The other objects are

foam cubes of an average density and dense foam boards; artefacts to

be moved easily; the foam is light and soft, it can be carried and in case

of fall, it will not affect anybody, not even itself. The foam absorbs the

force, it is flexible to the world, it can change its shape and retrieve it

later without the slightest inconvenience. These conditions oppose it to

the structures. In fact, in this space, there are two objects of different

categories: those made of boards, still, and those made of foam to be

moved, displaced.

A place where family-visitors are comfortable; they can touch and, as

the name indicates, build. They can raise a house, a passage and notice

with the experience not so much the size of objects and space, but

their own dimensions: how high is their head; how far away from their

nose is their little finger.

The second intervention, Place of liquid combinations, consist of

a room with metal structures, tables, glass objects and colours. The

metallic structures come from the drawings, from the sketches Stela

has been developing for years in her study notebooks. Thus, more than

pipes, they are ink strokes that have left the page and become volumes,

bodies in space, without losing the stroke condition. Its specific colour,

an opaque black that rejects any brightness and its non-industrial, non-

homogeneous character, emphasises this feature.

Completely different from Place to build, now we find ourselves in a

kind of chemical laboratory with tables and shelves for testing; and

cotton masses and an orange liquid inside glass containers as study

materials. In fact, I use the word laboratory because it is a place that

has no similarity with the world, but that is governed by specific rules,

issued from the color. A place where black, white and orange are the

only accepted tones.

There is a constant concern with color in the course of Stela Barbieri.

Several previous works since the 1990s have taken the color as a

fundamental issue. Thus, the choice of black, orange and white for this

installation hasn’t occurred by chance; it comes from previous research

with annatto seed - a very intense orange seed -, walnut extract and ink

- black par excellence -, and cotton - the image of white. In summary,

materials in which colour is essential, intrinsic.

In Metaphysics, Aristotle says that there are two classes of being. The

first when I declare: this is an orange; the second when I say: this is

orange. We might agree that in the first case I’m accounting the object,

the fruit, whereas in the second, I’m accounting a quality - attribute

or accident - of the fruit. Nevertheless, Stella Barbieri does not like to

deal with the attributes as if they were accidents, but as substances in

themselves, so that a particular colour or a particular feature becomes an

object. Therefore, it is not the thing in charge of possessing a determined

characteristic; it is the characteristic that is finally turned into a thing.

Thus, if it is usual to state: “This liquid is orange,” at an installation by

Barbieri we will have to put the phrase upside down, saying: “Orange is

this liquid.” Something I had been sensing also occurs: it is not that the

ink is black; but black is the ink.

In summary, the quality takes the place of the object, the adjective is

turned into a noun, the attribute is converted into substance. The roles

exchange that inevitably leads to a sensorial dialogue to the extent that if

a colour is an object, then it may be known not only through the eye, but

through touch, smell, hearing and even taste.

Thus, in a Barbieri’s artwork, the senses come into dialogue. Or rather,

ourselves, in this laboratory, in this place to be built, we notice their chat,

the conversation they usually keep without consulting us: I rarely listen to

the tip of my index talking to my eye, but I suspect they are always doing

intrigue. The work of Barbieri confirms my suspicion.

“(...) to find - to address - to penetrate is endless “*: Moving places in presence fields

Galciani Neves

A place is a state of mind. Although referring to a spatial dimension in

which things take up positions, it is made of human singularities and their

disorganisations, of frictions between different action modes, of voice

resonances, of voices that blow from us. In any case, the word place in the

dictionary of our imaginations is not a sealed shelter to be explained in a

geometric way, but maybe the intensity that pulses in the “delicate forest

dwellers of our own selves,” as stated by the poet Jules Supervielle. These

inhabitants who roam, map passages and create places like chores of life.

Stela Barbieri invites us to leave, to sight landscapes and return with

branches, winds, travel diaries, handfuls of sand and to contribute in

“workshops-works” where she blends perception and constructive

desire and where we can (re)construct other forests at the very time

we move into stories and plots in space. Thus, the “Places” are like

limitless maps, with tiny corners, points and shareable gaps in the vast

field in which we are not only the self. In her territories, there are scri-

bbles, visual essays and colours choreographing authorship in books.

While forms of sociability and affection verse, accumulate and transla-

te things, perceptions and flickering wills become part of the “Places”

and make them vibrate. Once there, one can experience details as “we

allow ourselves to unmechanise grammars of the body and space”,

proposes the artist. The history of these “Places” are many to be

invented and various are the contours to be drawn and overflowed at

the inside-outside of us.

Book: the place where we are

Waiting, in a way it might extend, as if it had tentacles, involving the

reader, the place between itself and the reader. This is the book. Place

to read is a library of books on standby, with extensions that are their

event - gestures that constitute, offering themselves to eyes and hands

that will change their scale and even their features. The books are there

in multiple personalities, in ambivalent versions: dispersed in coloured

pages, telling a bit of a story or eager to receive them; open in the

shape of wings or asleep guarding the time of writing. Place to read

92

121

is a workshop-work where Stela Barbieri flowed her artist books and

notebooks among books that are still to be. All of them are in constant

continuation, accustomed to the unpredictable of its inhabitants.

See-read-range are enjoyment conjugations of the artist’s books. They

appear as sequences of spaces where the drawing spreads, dipping

through the transparency of the pages, cutting them and unfolding

itself discontinuously. In these books, the idea / act of drawing occurs in

the palpability and experience of their materials, textures and colours.

So when we handle their wing-pages, distinct forms reveal themselves

as abstract landscapes frameworks expand. And a drawing-scripture ari-

ses by building bridges between the page and the place where we are.

The practice of storytelling, venturing into plans, ideas and works

projects, and the reflection on art, education and the numerous daily

crossings are fragmented in many books by Stela Barbieri. They are

longings and time records which tell a vigil of herself in permanent

porosity with the world, on pages, drawings and life remembrances. In

such notebooks, there is a concentration of tongue twists encouraged

by the organic nature of her drawings, so making an lexicon not at all

categorical in which image and word merge permanently in the artist’s

creative routine. Place to read is home to a multitude of readers-authors

that build covers, cover pages, pages, spines and invent different books

anatomies, migrating volume by volume, letter by letter, interline by

interline, navigating the rivers of stories to come.

Across the place: a playful poetic-action

Men can be defined, says Johan Huizinga, by the existence of a

“playful” component: and inborn impulse that shapes his personal

culture. Thus, men live conscious moments of reflection and verbal

and body expression, in which the phenomena of life and nature are

sighted so as to enable potential rhythms of transformation. Such a

view can dismantle some of our usual assumptions: “art is a serious

thing” or “someone in charge of any serious responsibility must move

away from a playful posture”.

We may think that Place to create spaces is an atmosphere of play - a

feature that is inherent to Stela Barbieri’s creation processes since a

long time ago - which engenders in that “place” a genesis of floating

architectures. The fundamental units proposed by the artist - coloured

rods, spherical shapes and a wooden platform - do not end as utility

tools, nor as formal truths for the construction of a space. Rather, they

are instruments of a poetic-action whose builders cross and conceive a

socialisation place to be and to act. Inspiration is free and it takes place

also on the hand that donates its shape.

Place to create spaces is a mutant stage, where coexistence relations

of spaces to be built and drawn embody scenes and imaginary

worlds. In this “place”, the “Homo Ludens” enjoys a playful reality

and experience, without delimitation verbs or social, ethical, aesthetic

fictions. And the ritual image of the play and the building spaces game

constitute rapture experiences before the new and, above all, those of

the excitement before the invention, propelling creative imagination

processes: tension, movement, change, enthusiasm for space, where

everything seems to gravitate poetically.

PLACE TO PLANT

Olivia Ardui

The gardens are associated, in the collective unconsciousness, to a com-

plex symbolic system with philosophical, mystical and political dimen-

sions. From the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, across the Renaissance

and oriental gardens, until it comes to the present urban backyards,

these spaces organise and include elements of the vegetable world in

an artificial structure designed by men. Maybe it’s this quality of middle

ground between men and the flora that the garden constitutes such a

privileged environment for the reconnection and rediscovery of nature

and its cycles, but also a place that emphasises the propensity to interio-

rity, urging a drift through the paths of imagination and memories. As if

the experience of the garden, distant but omnipresent reminiscence of

paradise, would intervene as an invitation to return to a more trustwor-

thy and simple experience.

For this capacity to reconnect men both the with physical nature and

with its very essence, the garden could be seen as an agent that raises

reflections about different aspects of their life. It is no coincidence that

the artist and educator Stela Barbieri adopts the garden in her wor-

kshop-work Place to plant.

Developed especially for SESC Osasco, the proposal is part of the Places

Project, a set of idealised workshops-works for different units of the

SESC São Paulo that stimulates direct interaction with the visitor, each

time with a different approach. If the other spaces made by Stela

Barbieri in this series are the result of considerations about own cultural

parameters, as the issue of reading or architecture, Place to plant pro-

poses a simple encounter with nature, from which we are increasingly

more distant in urban areas. This disconnection and this aloofness that

are characteristics of contemporaneity, in addition to the productivity

eagerness that leads our everyday lives, to the alienation induced by a

progressive virtualisation of interpersonal and work relationships, are

the cause of misfits, even if unconscious.

The green area outside the SESC Osasco, punctuated by fruit trees and

potted plants of various species, is occupied by some tables and shelves

with seeds, various herbs and flowers. As if in a laboratory, visitors,

both adults and children are invited to handle the seeds, plant them in

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available pots, manipulate them to form compositions or mandalas, thus

being encouraged to observe carefully, touch, feel, to stop for a moment and

be present. The facility also draws attention to the perpetual regeneration

cycles of plants, from the birth, maturation and death to a transformation

and thus pointing to an alternative to linear and unidirectional temporality

that governs our lives. In this device, workshops and storytelling sections

will be organised, all of them geared to that existential return to nature,

even when manufactured, having passed through men’s filter as a garden.

The garden concept, besides being protagonist of the educational proposal

of this workshop-work, is also a relevant metaphor to address the set of

Stela Barbieri’s work. Indeed, in addition to the plant world has always

been a source of inspiration for the artist, the garden, because it is a hybrid

between the real and the artificial, nature and culture, embodies the idea

of a dialectic between two ends, a dynamic that is also inherent in various

other pieces by the artist.

After an early career in painting, Stela Barbieri turned her focus to experi-

ment with materials and their textures. The pigment ink formerly applied on

canvas started to dye liquids contained in glass or plastic containers, or to

impregnate irregular shapes made of latex or wool. In precarious and orga-

nic sculptures, this confrontation between liquid and solid states indicates

a fragile condition of impermeability in which a fluid element is restrained,

but at any time, and sometimes as a matter of fact, it infiltrates and pene-

trates its receptacle. This is the case for example of Untitled (“Hourglass”),

in which two pieces of plastic are nailed to the wall containing annatto

seeds. They have red dyed some oil which drips from a plastic to another,

likely to give in to their weight.

If these sculptural works, made in the 1990s, already had some autonomy

from the painting format, they were still attached to the wall. Progressively,

Stella Barbieri’s experiments got autonomous and the artist attempted to

develop larger scale installations, such as the Liquid Narratives Circuit,

held in 2013. In this installation, metallic structures are the support for

a series of glasses and mechanisms that sometimes retain, other times

make circulate an orange liquid, in a condition of constant movement and

transformation.

In addition to her educational proposal, Stela Barbieri’s workshop-work

proposes, in a more subtle and indirect way, the return of several key

aspects of her former production in a more introspective and reflective

moment of her career. First, Place to plant is a continuation of the recent

years’ large installations and precedes some projects in public spaces.

Then, the direct reference to nature in an urban context reiterates a cross

binomial in the artist’s work: solid and hard /soft and fluid. Finally, the

importance of the mock-up in the development of this work, as well as

the relationship between micro and macro scales, is also a constant in Stela

Barbieri’s artistic production. As the garden, historically associated with

the representation of the whole cosmos in miniature, the experience of

the workshop-work is a metaphor: it consists of sowing, planting, and

cultivating seeds for life.

ENJOY

The workshop-work “Enjoy” is the installation of an environment that

combines an orchard, a kitchen and a meeting table. Stela Barbieri relies on

fruits, edible leaves and kitchen utensils and invites the audience not only to

prepare food and to venture into unexpected mixtures, but also to engender

conversation, exchange subjectivities and experience collective negotiations. If

the table, according to Maffesoli, may be the place to establish the strongest

friendships, important discussions and decisions and many other emotional

ties, the artist proposes “Enjoy” as a place where trigger perceptions during

the making and the eating can be unleashed, like driving modes of communi-

cation and sociability expressions.

TO SEE THE LANDSCAPE

A landscape is a way to apprehend the world, a design that we draw from

relations with the reality around us or with the imaginary places that inhabit

us. Stela Barbieri invites us to invent landscapes, to perceive them as a an

artifice of the subject, as a kind of inventory or testimony made of symbolic

form in a phenomenological confrontation with the environment, with peo-

ple, with the wishes. In this “workshop-work” project, matter (cardboard

boxes and colours) and exhibition space are incorporated into the public’s

gestures, into the presence and gaze of this temporary resident who is invi-

ted to set conditions, perspectives, passages and sight opportunities to the

affective architectures that are planned there.

Galciani Nevesstela barbieri, 2014

“tO see tHe laNDsCaPe” aND “eNJOY” MODels

OFiCiNa CUltUral OsWalD De aNDraDe

sãO PaUlO-sP

Stela Barbieri rediscovers the vital load asleep in the industrialised

area. So her sculptures are not exhausted in the limits of its organic

unexpectedly appearances. Some exude odours, while others do not

cease to purge liquid. The relationship between her sculptures and the

organic mysteries began in the early achievements, full of reference

to some vegetable and animal surfaces that, when placed against the

light, reveal the wire eT-structural that shapes them. But the iron lines

pressed by cellophane sheets - elements of ancient sculptures - were

not enough for the artist, since it was necessary to awaken the mate-

rials out of their lethargic sleep. It was necessary that the iron would

oxidise and attack the paper, so that the result would be more than a

metaphor; that the beans would germinate under the cotton so that

an unusual topography could break out. Her sculptures aspire to life

and to all the fertility thereupon. This is where the merging between

its parts come from; the erotic engine that boosts them. Its making is

guided by the desire that the substances are animate and that time

restarts to drain in a whisper that proliferates in stains, patinas and

decomposition.

Agnaldo Farias

There is something of a receptacle in this organic construction suspended

in copper wires, sort of a shelter and protection to a volatile body with

sawdust and redness. Stela Barbieri is an artist who is sensitive to interiority

and to the directions that may arise from this commitment. The fault here

is search: to understand the behaviour of the matter through an expan-

sive use of space. A docile and slow search. Contrary to what the will of

warmth could indicate, the artist does not deny the matter, hiding it in

secret places. She prefers the hypothesis that there is not enough room

to the delicacy of emotion. Therefore, the contents leak out of a female

topography, forcing the exit of the borders. Nest lap emancipation.

Lisette Lagnado

Colour and line contribute to set up the drama. This dramatic condition,

between laughing and weeping, is recorded here by the red spilled on

wires coiled floppily. There is something playful in placing the wool

over the support, a movement similar to the free gesture of scratching

and splashing paint on the wall or paper. No control is imposed on this

spontaneity flow until the material is fixed between two transparent strips

such as blood in laboratory. In this spontaneous moment, it is surprised by

controlling the will.

M. A. Milliet

In Stela Barbieri’s sculptures, it is the interior and exterior nations that

merge, the paradox in which gut and skin, viscera and surface are, if not

identical, non conflictual territories, feeding all the work and responding

for the fluency of its formal solutions. By bringing together these two

opposite poles, the work starts to want everything: us, ties, bags, stacked

materials, thrown stuff, stacked, hanging, drained, glued. An expansion

of the idea of form follows the inside and outside prohibited neighbour;

an indifference for what is ordered appearance, individualisation of

a vision. Everything here is a passage, a cocoon of another cocoon,

ungoverned and hungry skin, in afflicted expansion. The matter varies

its state and displays its successive qualities, it becomes the footprint of

all forms. What gives interest to these works is its excessive plasticity, as

if they could receive all operations. There is this a mixture of expressive

power and extreme passivity, which at its best moments seems to point

to a tragic comprehension of life, as if doing and undoing, freedom and

destination were the same.

Nuno Ramos

Stela Barbieri creates environments permeated by transparency and

delicacy. In her objects, there is the pulse of life responsible for draining,

unfolding, balancing, tensioning, bending, tearing.

It contrasts the weak and the strong, the hard and the soft, the dense and

the volatile, which contaminate, weave, blur, aspire and sweat together.

Redemption and fight. Her works reflect the non-stopping conflict that

permeates the life of contemporary men. Expressive power in the art

territory, the subtle intention reveals the accident, the casualty that resists

to an excessive control of the artistic practice.

Vitória Daniela Bousso and Simona Misan Liberman

The doorway:

Strainers of an invisible materiality

Pregnant living-matter in suspension

The time being regurgitated by things.

The space enquired between one span and another

Basins pregnant with gravity swallowing everything

Omens corroding the daily life

Its tessitura draining through the doorway.

straining-vessels of our perceptions,

The lee suspends the pooled understanding

Invested in the possession of something immaculate

Rubens Espírito Santo

Editorial Coordination and Art Direction Fernando Vilela

Design Marilda Donatelli

Photos Ana Claúdia Rodrigues, Arthur Calasans, Daniel Ozana, Denise Adams, Fausto Chermont, Fernanda Beraldi, Fernanda Gomes, Fernanda Simionato, Fernando Vilela, Joseti Capusso, Laura Barbieri Gorski, Maetê Filizola Azevedo, Márcia Xavier, Mariana Francoio, Mariana Galender, Mauricio Simonetti, Rômulo Fialdini, Pedro Palhares, Raimo Benedetti - Estúdio B, Urga Maira Cardoso

Videos Caca Vicalvi, Camila Guerreiro, Carlos Zalazik, Documenta Vídeo, Fernando Vilela, Instituto Cultural Itaú, Luis Alexandre Kobal Lucato, Pedro Palhares, Raimo Benedetti - Estúdio B, Renato Barbieri, Rinaldo Martinucci, Tamara Ka, TV Escola, TV Senac

www.stelabarbieri.com

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